When Manchester United won the treble in 1999, Sir Alex Ferguson’s team needed just 79 points to claim the Premier League title. United won ‘only’ 22 of their 38 league games that season.
That brings some perspective to the performance of the new champions Arsenal over the course of the last nine months. Victory over Crystal Palace yesterday took Mikel Arteta’s team to 85 points and that’s a total that would have won the league last season, too.
So Arsenal are worthy champions. Their football has not been to everybody’s taste and it has been underpinned by what is statistically the best defence across all of Europe’s top five leagues.
Arsenal have conceded an average of only 2.5 shots on target per league game this season and that is a simply extraordinary number.
Are Arsenal a truly outstanding side? No, I don’t think they are.
Champions Arsenal are not outstanding by the recent standards of Man City and Liverpool
Not by the standards set by Manchester City and Liverpool in the Pep Guardiola-Jurgen Klopp era. They are simply not at that astonishing level of consistent performance.
Liverpool won the league with 84 points under Arne Slot last season but apart from that, Arsenal’s points-haul this season is the lowest by a title-winning side since Leicester City lifted the trophy with 81 points a decade ago.
Arsenal have won the league because they have improved on last season – every one of their key metrics have got better – but also because other teams – namely Liverpool and City – endured disappointing seasons.
We should not hide from that. It’s true.
City have only gathered fewer points than this season’s 78 once in Guardiola’s ten years – and that was last year.
Arsenal, then, have been handed opportunity in what has been an at times underwhelming Premier League season and they have taken it. That is what really matters.
They were asked a serious question after their defeat at City last month and have answered it by winning five consecutive league games and coming through a two-legged Champions League semi-final against Atletico Madrid.
That has taken a deep reserve of mental strength and illustrates that Arteta’s players have improved on that metric, too.
What all this will bring them is belief and confidence. When they look in the mirror, Arsenal now see winners staring back. Questions have been answered. Beliefs have been underpinned. That does a sports team and almost unquantifiable amount of good and it is this that not only sets up Arsenal for Saturday’s Champions League final against PSG in Budapest but also the two or three years that stand ahead of the Gunners now.
Opportunity knocks for Arsenal, in Europe and at home. They will start second favourites in Hungary but that won’t harm them.
They know that they have the defensive structures and disciplines to frustrate the defending European champions.
In the Premier League, the future is theirs to claim and this season’s table tells them that.
City have a new manager incoming. Liverpool are in a bit of a mess. The other two inhabitants of this year’s top five – Manchester United and Aston Villa – have done very well but are not equipped to win the Premier League.
Chelsea? Tottenham? Newcastle? We know the answers to those questions and they aren’t good.
So there may be some begrudging praise for Arsenal this time round but they have a platform now and, this summer, some more money to spend.
The squad is young. The majority of Arteta’s players have improvement in them. So does he. They are finally where they need to be.
This may not be an outstanding Premier League team by recent standards. But there is no reason Arsenal cannot become one.
Arteta’s honesty is refreshing
In admitting to Match of the Day yesterday that he had suffered self-doubt about whether he was really good enough after City beat his team at the Etihad Stadium, Arteta will hopefully have won a few friends.
It was a rare moment of real human honesty in a football world that is by and large full of bulls***.
Rooney soundbite spot on
Elsewhere on Match of the Day, Wayne Rooney had one of his better moments of the season when asked for his views on outgoing City players Bernardo Silva and John Stones receiving guards of honour on being substituted.
‘Save it until after the game,’ said Rooney, with a bristling sense of indignation. ‘If I was a Villa player I would have been fuming.’
I was at the game and my instinct was also that it was a lovely sight but also wrong at the same time. Is that possible? I think so.
This was a competitive game – the final Champions League placings could have been influenced by it – and it should have been treated as such.
Rooney, meanwhile, has emerged as a credible soundbite analyst in his debut season for the BBC. Now he needs to get better at the longer, deeper sections.
Those who matter at the Beeb are convinced it will come over time.
Wayne Rooney has emerged as a credible soundbite analyst and the BBC are pleased
Good news and bad for doubting Thomas
Up until his last minute goal that was chalked off, Phil Foden was sadly anonymous on Guardiola’s final day and that was sad, given the outgoing City manager’s role in turning him from protégé into a double Player of the Year just two seasons ago.
It seems England manager Thomas Tuchel has got it right by omitting Foden from his World Cup squad even if shots across his bows were delivered by others who were similarly excluded from the 26-man list last Friday.
Morgan Gibbs-White, Jarrod Bowen and Cole Palmer all scored on the final day.
With all that in mind, though, it was impossible not to be impressed by someone who will be going to America, Villa’s Ollie Watkins.
The way Watkins left Stones – another World Cup squad member – on his backside for his second goal was sensational and so is the Villa striker’s record against what we traditionally call the big clubs this season.
Indeed Watkins is the first player in Premier League history to score twice against City, Liverpool and Chelsea in the same season.
No way to go, Mo
The farewells at Anfield were noticeable for the different ways in which they have been conducted, meanwhile.
Andrew Robertson took time out to congratulate Guardiola for his service to City and the Premier League and also to departing Everton captain Seamus Coleman. That was classy.
It has been a different story for Mohamed Salah. He got his wish to play one final time in front of the Kop and almost signed off with a goal, hitting the post with a free-kick.
Salah departs as a Liverpool great but we all saw the way he chose to leave, too.
We heard and read what he said and the chances are that, once microphones are placed before him at the World Cup, there will be more of the same.
Those of us with eyes and ears and a sense of objectivity at our disposal, will not forget it.
From the moment he took aim at his manager Arne Slot by the team bus at Elland Road last November, it has been a pretty grisly spectacle.
Mohamed Salah cries during his Liverpool farewell – but the way he did it won’t be forgotten
Only goals will lift Everton
Everton were bit-part players as Tottenham somehow managed to stay up but David Moyes will go into the summer wondering how to take his club to the next level. If the likes of Bournemouth and Brighton are doing it, why not Everton?
Poor end of season form means that Everton have finished with just a point more than last year and in exactly the same 13th position.
Had Jack Grealish not been injured and had they got more from young attacker Tyler Dibling then it may have been different. But, then, all clubs suffer big injuries.
What has done for Everton has been a relative lack of goals – only two teams outside of the bottom three have scored fewer – and a squad list without a single player in double figures in the league perhaps tells its own story.
The last proper scorer of goals Everton had was Dominic Calvert-Lewin. He ended the season with fourteen – but sadly they were scored for Leeds.
Will Europe really benefit Sunderland?
Seeing two promoted clubs – Leeds and Sunderland – stay up has been heartening and my award for Manager of the Year goes to Regis le Bris on Wearside.
Sunderland’s final day win over Chelsea saw them close within six points of defending champions Liverpool and that’s a truly extraordinary fact.
By changing the make-up of their squad so dramatically last summer – only two or three survivors of last May’s play-off final win played regularly this season – Sunderland may just have established a recruitment model for the likes of Hull City to follow.
Easier said than done, obviously.
Sunderland will now play in Europe next season. They will celebrate that for a while and quite right, too.
The reality is that it will make their second season in the Premier League harder than the first. They will need another very good summer.
Sunderland celebrate making it into the Europa League after beating Chelsea on Sunday
Nobody wins from Hammers mess
There is talk that Scott Parker may be lined up to try and get West Ham back out of the Championship.
The recently sacked Burnley manager got the Lancashire club up last season and has previously done the same for Fulham and Bournemouth.
Consideration should be given to Nuno Espirito Santo first, though.
The Portuguese manager had considerable help from the relationship Wolves had with his agent Jorge Mendes when he brought them into the Premier League 2018 but he was still the one doing the coaching as the midlands club racked up 99 points.
Those who played for him, tell of an inspirational style.
Meanwhile, of all the mistakes West Ham have made in recent times, surely the decision to hire Graham Potter in January 2025 stands out as one of the worst.
If ever there was a case of the wrong fit, this was it and we all called it at the time.
Potter will take Sweden to the World Cup but it will take more than a good summer in America to restore the Premier League reputation of a coach who should have chosen more wisely after being spat out by Chelsea.
Shaw joins an elite club
Luke Shaw may not be going to America this summer after he was another big name not to do enough to impress Tuchel.
But the talented left back has done as much as anybody to get Manchester United back on an even keel this season.
Shaw is 30 now and his terrible record with injuries is well known. So to see him start every single one of United’s 38 Premier League games has been heartening and should encourage any player who thinks their body will just keep letting them down.
The other members of what we will now call the ’38 club’ this season were Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk, Bournemouth’s Adrien Truffert, Everton’s James Garner and West Ham’s Jarrod Bowen.
Interestingly, only four goalkeepers – Everton’s Jordan Pickford, Fulham’s Bernd Leno, Bournemouth’s Djordje Petrovic and Brighton’s Bart Verbruggen – managed to start every league game which maybe suggests the position is proving more arduous and physical as the game in this country continues to evolve.
Personally, I blame Arsenal. For everything.*
Luke Shaw has show durability in playing all 38 games in the Premier League this season
King Kinsky
Finally, after his Champions League horror show Spurs ‘keeper Anton Kinsky has his redemption.
A big added time save against Leeds to turn secure a point and now another against Everton to make sure three didn’t become one.
Two sets of fingertips = three points earned. Tottenham stayed up by two.
Build the man a statue!
*This was joke.
